Friday, July 26, 2013

Reuters' climate alarmism down by 50% since 2012

Media Matters for America, a propaganda arm of the neo-Stalinist movement in the U.S., has complained that the number of articles published by Reuters that promote the unlimited climate hysteria has dropped by 48 percent in the recent 12 months.

They take the data and interpretations from David Fogarty, an indisputable hardcore climate activist, who would be employed until recently as the "climate change correspondent for Asia".

Just try to appreciate how crazy such an arrangement was. A biased activist who makes Lysenko fair and balanced in comparison was hired by an agency for which the truth and accuracy is the main asset.

And he wasn't employed for a proper job that should exist in peaceful times. He wasn't hired to cover all of physical sciences or the whole Wall Street or the culture. He was hired to cover just stories about a fabricated tiny appendix of one of the least significant, least hard, and least prestigious subdisciplines of physical sciences. And in fact, he wasn't supposed to follow the whole climatology because it would be still too hard for him; he would only cover the catastrophic climatology. And he wasn't even supposed to cover all of catastrophic climatology; he could make living out of climate change articles about Asia.

So he was inventing, cherry-picking, and spinning stories about the environment in Asia, its hypothetical dark future, and the mankind's hypothetical cause behind that dark future, especially the carbon dioxide. He was earning tens of thousands of dollars by writing the same junk you may still see on his Twitter account.

Well, I wouldn't say that Ingrassia – who has previously worked for the Wall Street Journal in... Detroit – is a true climate sceptic. He just can't be counted as a full-fledged climate activist. And in fact, he didn't even pretend to be a clearcut skeptic. The most accurate wording we have is this one from Fogarty:

In April last year, Paul Ingrassia (then deputy editor-in-chief) and I met and had a chat at a company function. He told me he was a climate change sceptic. Not a rabid sceptic, just someone who wanted to see more evidence mankind was changing the global climate.

Incidentally, the full quote mentioned by Junk Science (and, consequently, Climate Depot) is completely omitted by Media Matters for America and other far left sources that just say that Ingrassia is a "skeptic". Clearly, they mean this label as an accusation of heresy and their goal is to activate the remaining cells of their movement and make them work to hurt Mr Ingrassia.

The quote itself and other signs make it rather clear that Ingrassia is a classic example of a "lukewarmer". Similar people react to the social environment that surrounds them. These opportunists' courage and their spine's rigidity is arguably bounded from above but they have some personal integrity and if the external pressures decrease beneath a certain threshold, they just start to behave honestly. It's encouraging to see that the atmosphere at Reuters has improved sufficiently so that lukewarmers such as Mr Ingrassia may have corrected their and their agency's behavior in this way. This particular manager could finally have done something that is expected from his job – to require impartiality as well as genuine news and information from the correspondents instead of propaganda that may be fabricated pretty much at any moment, regardless of the existence of any significant events that Reuters should impartially cover.

52% of the climate hysteria we had seen before April 2012 is still too much, however. Moreover, there are many other agencies and news outlets that haven't been dehysterized, not even to Reuters' modest extent. But Reuters is an important enough agency and this order-one correction is moderately good news, anyway.

Incidentally, Spain chose an amusing way to get out of the out-of-control photovoltaic fiscal black hole. By a new royal decree, they de facto nationalized the Sun by stating that whoever absorbs the sunlight without taxation may pay up to EUR 30 million in fines. So be careful not to get suntan while in Spain. When you analyze what this bizarre decree is supposed to achieve, you may see that it was written by the sensible people. Nevertheless, the detailed steps meant to undo some absurdities from the years when the climate hysteria peaked look comparably absurd. Via soylentrefuge.blogspot.com.

14 comments:

These days that applies not only to climate. About the only BBC news or commentaries that I can watch or read without feeling nauseous concern football. It has been like this since the fall of communism, i.e. nearly a quarter of a century, but recently it seems to have reached the nadir. And it's not just that they are so PC, the level of ignorance of some their journalists can be quite spectacular.

Yes, that's what I meant by everything (i.e. not only climate). I agree with what you said. I also observed further deterioration over the past two years. For example, imagine this. One of their star commentators seriously discussing astrology (!!!) with a specialist (astrologist) for about 10 minutes essentially in prime time.

There is a big difference between what we in Europe call "football" and what the Americans call "soccer". They may look the same on the field - but if you look outside (which can be risky in the case of football) you will soon know what I mean.

I was just teasing you lucretius. Although I do not understand what you mean by risky in the case of football. Do you mean Amerikan football or what we Amerikans call soccer? And what is the risk? British soccer fans?

Did you really think I did not know it? And of course I was referring to the fact that both in Japan (which I know very well) and in the US "soccer" is a nice sport for the whole family including small kinds while in most of Europe (I don't know if everywhere but certainly in all the countries whose passports I hold) it is mainly an opportunity to have a fight (for the so called "fans"). This is particularly curious in view of the persistent European myth of the "violent nature" of the American society.

Pity I do not understand the undoubtedly interesting paper (too technical for me). I have a question concerning mass (only loosely related to this blog post).What is mass? In classical physics, there were 2 kinds of mass. The inertial mass (resistance of body to change in motion) and the gravitational mass (effect of gravitation on the body). The general theory of relativity showed that these two masses are equivalent (principle of equivalence). The theory of relativity also showed that mass and energy are equivalent.(E=mc2)There is a different concept of mass in quantum field theory - the Higgs mechanism which is supposed to give mass to elementary particles by interacting with them.Are these two concepts of mass in any way related or is it an unsolved problem whose solution requires a unification of gravity with quantum field theory? If mass is energy, what is the relation of energy to Higgs field? How does string theory view mass?

But photons are drawn into a black hole which implies they have a gravitational mass. So the mass of general relativity seems to be fundamentally different from mass in QFT (Higgs mechanism). In GTR, mass/energy/momentum curve spacetime, but Higgs fields dont. I suppose we need to wait for someone do discover the unified theory.

You are mixing too many things. First, it is hard to understand why you exactly think that "a photon has a gravitational mass" because it falls into a black hole. There's no valid reasoning of this sort. By the equivalence principle, everything accelerates in the same way in gravitational fields, regardless of its mass.

Second, you haven't explained this reasoning of yours but I guess that it is based on your confusing the total relativistic mass with the rest mass. Only the latter is zero for the photon; the photon still carries the relativistic mass - i.e. the total energy divided by c^2.

Third, you are mixing gravity with the Higgs mechanism. The Higgs mechanism says where some of the contributions to the rest mass of particles comes from. Gravity tells you what this mass is doing when it's already there - what are its consequences. These are completely different questions. See, for example,

yes and no. Photon beams carry energy and attract each other. Pure massless gravitons interact to create a black hole. Actually, by an argument of Nieuwenhuizen of ~1970, the graviton is really massless, otherwise the sun would deviate light twice as much as experiments show, whereas we are not sure experimentally that the photon mass is strictly zero. As far as I know, the best limit comes from studying the magnetic filed of Jupiter.